I was really excited to talk about the Keeley Electronics Monterey. I think artist inspired pedals are cool, but I particularly like is when you use an artist inspired pedal to totally NOT sound like the artist. The voicings and effects designed to sound like someone can be used to inspire your own sound. For example, I remember one time seeing a Dimebag Distortion on a player’s board, and they were playing stuff far away from metal and used it for lead boost. Interesting.
The Keeley Electronics Monterey is about achieving a few of the effects and tones from non-other Jimi Hendrix. People are referring to this pedal as a Hendrix in a box, and I get it. It’s a multi-effects stomp box that has vintage fuzz, rotary speaker, vibe, harmonic and auto-wah, octave up and octave down. Also the unit comes with an expression pedal. 2 footswitch for ‘channels’. Right side is fuzz and the left is modulation.
The tones you can hit are all over the place, and is incredibly versatile. It’s somewhat insane on what you can pull off with this.
While doing some research, I came across a new demo guy to me… Jay Leonard J. Check out this demo:
Initially, I was not into this demo. I’m not a fan of full band/recording for demo’ing pedals. Too much stuff happening to really get a feel for how the pedal sounds. I was glad that he then went into discussing individual features and I was really enjoying this guy’s enthusiasm. And damn.. he’s a player. And he’s a player with a wide range of styles, which is required for a pedal like this. I will definitely be following Jay Leonard J and you should be too! His stuff, is absolutely great!!!!
If you’re thinking you want to pick up the Keeley Electronics Monterey it is currently available for only $299 at Amazon which is a bargain for what this pedal can do!
Let me know what you think about the Keeley Electronics Monterey pedal by commenting below!
